Thanks for the tips again.
This past week has been a classic DNN nightmare really. My careful test and backup routine got me 6 months into an 8 portal instance and then crumbled. I'm not really sure how to get out of this. I think DNN needs some sort of self-test script that one could run after upgrades, module installs and other alterations. It would run through a set of actions and test all vital functionality. I believe I've been caught out somewhere in the last week by one of quite a few module updates and installs I made prior to moving to a new account. somewhere along the line, something around the profile page became buggy.
The whole drama has been made much worse by Webhost4life's inability to provide a reliable and fully functional VPS account and I'm 99% positive I'll be asking for my payment back and will move on.
In any case, today I upgraded both to DNN 4.37 and to an SQL2005 database in order to get the site back online and ensure that none of the basics were faulty. I tried removing modules going back 2-3 weeks to long before I last used the profiles page, but that failed to fix it.
I will try your suggestion Rodney, of loading a copy of the db onto a fresh blank 4.37 instance to rule it out.. I'll do that on the server tomorrow evening.
I've uploaded the ManageUsers.ascx.vb and manageusers.ascx pages fresh to the server from the latest upgrade.zip, but that didn't help. I do find it odd that occasionally the host portal's profiles page will work, but I haven't figured out exactly how to make it do so. It just does now and then like when I removed the Homepages module.
oh crappp... now there's a new error.. when I try to view the event log in DNN.. this comes up:
Error: Log Viewer is currently unavailable.
DotNetNuke.Services.Exceptions.ModuleLoadException: Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "Latin1_General_CI_AI" and "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS" in the equal to operation. ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "Latin1_General_CI_AI" and "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS" in the equal to operation. at
etc...................
man! Ok, I see from a search that this is from upgrading from sql200 to sql2005. I was told by the host that I merely needed to restore sql200 into a blank sql2005 db. I guess not :(